Illuminate audience data reporting suspended for a further year

National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) will not be required to submit audience survey data to Arts Council England (ACE) until April next year at the earliest, the funding body has confirmed.

The move extends a previous suspension of reporting requirements to the Illuminate platform by an additional year.

The online data collection and analysis platform had been scheduled to be up and running on 1 April 2023 to coincide with the start of the 2023-26 National Portfolio, but delays meant it did not launch until June last year.

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When it did launch, a range of system problems were raised with ACE which resulted in some reporting requirements, such as survey data, being suspended until 1 April 2024.

News that the suspension has been extended comes as ACE says it intends to use the data it collects to make the case to government for additional support for the sector.

It is not clear how the dropping of reporting requirements for audience surveys will affect the range of data ACE provides.

In 2022/23, NPOs were asked to collect a minimum of 380 survey responses over the course of the year. With 828 NPOs for that portfolio period – that would have equated to 314,640 responses.

In total for 2023/24, with a larger portfolio of 985 organisations, around 220,000 surveys were provided to Illuminate despite reporting not being mandatory.

ACE declined to reveal how many responses were actually received for 2022/23 year, stating that not all NPOs were required to conduct audience surveys due to exemptions being in place based on factors including investment level, programming and audience composition.

It said comparing 2022/23 figures with 2023/24 submissions would not provide an accurate picture.

'Organisations did engage'

Kate Fitzgerald, who runs a consultancy firm helping cultural organisations to understand their data, says that while surveying audiences was not compulsory in 2023/2024, organisations were still encouraged to do so.

"Some organisations chose to use the Illuminate platform, others worked the mandatory questions into their own surveys in other platforms and uploaded their results to Illuminate," she said.

"But the key is, organisations did engage, with ACE reporting over 220,000 survey responses so far. It will be interesting to see if ACE go on to publish the number of organisations the survey data comes from, but this level of response should allow them to weigh the data regionally against the population."

However, Fitzgerald still has concerns about the processes for submitting surveys.

These include Illuminate not accepting exported surveys that have blank responses where respondents have skipped a question rather than answering “prefer not to say” to demographic questions.

"In short, if you don’t make every demographic question mandatory, you might need to do some manual data formatting.

"One organisation, who chose not to make the questions mandatory, reported that this means that they now have to manually change any blank responses to “Prefer not to say” just so their upload will be accepted."

"Add to this that there is no easy way to download all data or all postcodes. Instead, you must download results spreadsheets for each survey and then combine them, making analysis more manual and time consuming. Again, all this takes up valuable time."

'Essential information'

An ACE spokesperson said: "All National Portfolio Organisations report on their funded activities to the Arts Council, including audience and participation figures.

"This data demonstrates the impact our investment has on communities everywhere, and contributes to our own official reporting.

"For 2023/24 and 2024/25 we have relaxed the requirement for NPOs to also report audience survey data, which enhances their reporting with data captured from audience surveys.

"We made this decision to give organisations more time to adapt to the new reporting requirements and ensure they focus on contributing the essential information.

"Following user feedback we are looking to make improvements to ensure the platform and survey collection mechanisms are as suitable and straightforward for as many users as possible."